[Tutorial Services][How Tutoring
Services Differ] [Methods
and Standards for Studies and Tutoring] [ Tutor
Duties] [ Student Duties]
Tutorial Services
With some services, tutors are independent and you
contact them directly. In other services, you ask for a tutor to be
assigned. Online, both students and tutor should be able to
draw on the whiteboard and speak to each other. See methods
and standards below before you hire, and require them. Good
luck.
In tutoring face to face and online, the quality of
help may vary greatly. For a tutor you do not know, Arrange a
first meeting and trial session free of charge.
- Tutoring service may offer formal programs of study (short small-group
courses) with standard assignments and test, small to large, for their
tutors and clients to follow. Diagnostic tests may determine skill level and
hence program selection. The programs or short-courses, one at a
time and one after another, provide more and more drill, practice and
theory. The program requires the student to sit down and master the rules
and conventions of mathematics, one at a time and one after
another.
- Tutors in contrast to tutoring services may provide one lesson at a
time, one lesson after another, without following a master plan, except to
help a student catch up, keep up or stay ahead of a current course. This
kind of service may reflect the judgment of tutors and students. It
can be more efficient if a tutor adjusts the pace and what is covered to
reflect the needs and abilities of a student. The best way to end
coverage is to halve the frequency of the lessons, but keep the tutor
on board for periodic check-ups.
As a parent, even before tutoring begins, you can insist
your son or daughter keep and place in a binder their written work in
mathematics to record their difficulties and progress. Tell your son or
daughter that neatness counts. Evaluation is based on what they write. There
is more to mathematics than solving a question. The work that led to the
solution needs to be recorded to catch errors in reasoning - unwritten it is
invisible - and to provide practice in presenting work clearly and fully. Any
thing less is substandard. Written work is the key. There is more
to mathematics than just obtaining a solution - presentation counts. While
mathematics involves some mental agility, writing and drawing on paper
extends our memories and provide a tool for reasoning on paper and presenting
the steps in their reasoning. With practice, the number of steps
and detail needed to show work may decrease but it should not disappear.
Written Work: Insist that your son or daughter produce written work
that records what is covered, the difficulties and the progress made.
Look at the neatness level of the work.
The first meeting with a tutor is a time to say what you expect as the
student, or parent of the student and to plan future sessions.
For tutoring that supports course work,
identify the course and with the tutor form a list of skills and topics that
need to be developed or checked. Ask the tutor to say (a) which
skills and concepts are needed for further studies, and to say (b) which are
needed only for the next final examination. Form a list of skills and
topics to review, develop and check. That may take more one
meeting or session. Tutors should be paid for this planning time.
Completeness: Students and their parents need to
identify the skills and topics they want to master, and say they are willing
to provide the time to meet and master any earlier skills and topics that are
required. The rules and conventions at each level of mathematics need
to be mastered fully and completely. While there may be more
rules and conventions than a student may want to learn and follow, the key ones cannot
be skipped. Think of the young child who insists there are too many letters
in the alphabet to learn. We know better. All the letters need to be
recognized for the sake of spelling, reading and writing. Likewise in
mathematics, key skills and concepts cannot be skipped.
Checks are very important. In face to face tutoring and education, tutors and
teachers can collect and place in a binder, the written work of a student to
record progress and/or difficulty. The emphasis on written work - doing
mathematics on paper clearly and properly - is necessary since students
performance in mathematics is mostly based on it. In online tutoring,
students should turn their written work into pdf or image files with the aid of
electronic scanners, and then email that work to the tutor for
correction. Two way faxing or regular mail provide
alternatives.
Parents - Do not Blame your son or daughter for all
difficulties in mathematics: The site author has meet incoherent,
indecipherable textbooks approved and required for use in school classroom by
bureaucrats. If you cannot understand a textbook, ask fellow parents or
people with a good background in mathematics if they can. Sometimes the
fault in education is not with your child or teen, it is with the textbooks
and training of their teachers. Many schools employ teachers untrained in
mathematics to give mathematics courses. So their habits may be self-formed.
Combine that with subtandard textbooks and your school district is providing
substandard training in mathematics.
For a program studies planned by the tutor and student, tutorial
sessions may (i) correct written work in front of the student(s), (ii)
cover more material, and (iii) arrange for more written work to be submitted -
an assignment from the tutor and/or a selection of the written work the
student has to do or has done for a course. Good luck.
- Explain skills and concepts
- Use proper notation in explanations to provide a model for students to
follow.
- Correct answers and more importantly, the written work that led to those
answers.
- Arrange and test methods for the submission of written work, and
the
correction of the latter in front of the student
- Plan or follow program of
studies with a student (recommended) OR
help the student on demand without looking ahead.
- Tell students when they are skipping skills and concepts that need to be
mastered.
- Ethics I: Withdraw your services when a student insists on trying
to cover material for which they are not prepared.
- Be willing to review earlier skills and topics as needed? Students
who insist on skipping earlier skills and topics needed for later ones are
inviting trouble.
- If you can, identify where your skills need help or where
you need to check your work. Providing a course description could be
enough to identify and locate what ideas you want to cover. Try to make a
long term plan of studies and with your tutor try to understand in what
needs to be done earlier and what will be done later.
Gifted students may consult a tutor for help with details or nuances.
- Prepare in advance if possible, so that the tutor spends more and more
time explaining errors what you have done and less time watching you work.
The written may stem from questions that a tutor sets.
Arrange and test methods for the submission of written
work, and the correction of the latter in front of the student. For
online tutoring scan your written work into say pdf format, and then (a)
email the pdt file(s) to your tutor, or (b) upload them during the tutoring
session. The www.WiZIQ.com site provides
a platform for this (membership is free). It may be ad-supported.
- Watch the written work of your tutor, your fellow students and teacher for
proper ways to present and format your own work.
- Compare and contrast the work and presentation of your tutor and teachers
with that in course textbooks. Course textbooks often set a
standard to follow for the presentation of written work. Look at the
location of equal signs, arithmetic signs for addition, subtraction,
multiplication and roots. Look at how fractions and mixed numbers are
written.
- Getting Help With Problems. Students should ask fellow
students, parents and tutors for help in understanding how to solve problems
and in checking or correcting their written work for all errors of logic and
presentation. That extra effort and training may lead to better marks
for the homework, but more importantly, it may lead to better skills
and comprehension. The better marks can be seen as a reward for
seeking the help and correction before submitting work for marks. In
the foregoing, students may copy, but students who have to copy will be
caught on tests and final examinations. So if you are a student
getting help, you should use it to improve your own skills and
knowledge, and not just to copy - the latter would be a waste of time, and
in the case of tutoring, the money paid for it.
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